"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the
animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel
nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest
lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams, (1722-1803)

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

WASHINGTON, July 31 (UPI) -- A Marine
operations commander told lawmakers Wednesday he gave troops in Libya
permission to respond to a September 2012 attack on a U.S. mission in
Tripoli.Testifying in closed session before the House Armed Services
Committee, Col. George Bristol contradicted claims by some congressional
Republicans he had issued a stand-down order following the attack, in
which U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stephens and three other
Americans were killed, The Hill reported.Bristol, who commanded Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans
Sahara at the time of the attack, said he gave the Tripoli security team
leader, Lt. Col. S.E. Gibson, permission to act freely in response to
the attack, The Hill said, citing a description it had received of the
committee's members-only briefing.Gibson told Congress last month he was ordered not to send his team
to Benghazi because they were needed in Tripoli in the event of an
attack on the U.S. Embassy.Republicans argue the United States wasn't prepared to respond adequately to the Benghazi attack.They accuse the Obama
administration of downplaying or covering up the administration's
handling of the attack, its lead-up and aftermath during the heat of the
2012 presidential campaign."Colonel Bristol has experience that could be valuable in deepening
our understanding of the events of that day," a committee source told
The Hill."Of particular interest to the committee is what our posture was in
the weeks and months that preceded the attack," the source said.Bristol, a seasoned combat commander, stepped down from his task force commander post in March.When House Subcommittee on National Security Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Senate Armed Services Committee member Lindsey Graham,
R-S.C. -- two vocal critics of the administration's Benghazi response
-- requested Bristol appear, they were told 3 1/2 weeks ago he retired
July 1 and could not be ordered to testify.But Marine Corps Times reported July 17 Bristol had not yet retired and was still on active duty until the end of July.Marine Corps spokeswoman Maj. Shawn Haney confirmed Bristol would in fact retire Aug. 1.A Pentagon spokesman said the "initial confusion" over Bristol's status was due to a "personnel administrative error.""The Department of Defense has fully cooperated with congressional
requests to understand the attacks on the Benghazi compound," Pentagon
spokesman Maj. Robert Firman said, adding Bristol would "be available to
meet with House and Senate members and their staffs."CBS News reported Tuesday Bristol already met with Graham.Congress plans more Benghazi-related hearings after its August recess.

Republican Governor Chris Christie slammed Senator Rand Paul on Tuesday, after the Kentucky senator accused him of begging the federal government for money.During a press conference, Christie noted that his state paid more in
federal taxes than they got back, which was not true to of the state
that Paul represented. According to the Tax Foundation,
for every $1.00 Kentucky’s taxpayers send to Washington, they get back
$1.51. In contrast, for every $1.00 New Jersey’s taxpayers sent to
Washington, they get only 61 cents back.“I find it interesting that Senator Paul is accusing us of having a
gimme, gimme, gimme attitude toward federal spending when in fact New
Jersey is a donor state, we get 61 cents back on every dollar we send to
Washington,” Christie said. “And interestingly Kentucky gets $1.51 on
every dollar they sent to Washington.”“So
if Senator Paul wants to start looking at where he is going to cut
spending to afford defense, maybe he should start looking at cutting the
pork barrel spending he brings home to Kentucky at a $1.51 on every
dollar and not look at New Jersey where we get 61 cents for every
dollar,” he continued. “Maybe Senator Paul could deal with that when he
is trying to deal with the reduction of spending on the federal side,
but I doubt he would because most Washington politicians only care about
bringing home the bacon so they can get reelected.”Monday night of Fox News’ Hannity, Paul criticized Christie for asking the federal government for disaster relief aid after Hurricane Sandy.“If he cared about protecting this country maybe he wouldn’t be in
this gimme, gimme, gimme all the money you have in Washington or don’t
have, and he’d be a little more fiscally responsive,” Paul said.Paul was responding to a comment Christie made last week, in which the New Jersey governor said libertarians supported dangerous policies.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Health premiums in Maryland’s exchanges will be “among the lowest of the 12 states that have available proposed or approved rates for comparison,” the state’s exchange — Maryland Health Connection — announced Friday. The news comes just as New York,Oregon, Montana, California, and Louisiana are also reporting lower than expected premiums.In Maryland, a 25-year-old will be able to purchase a plan that is
more comprehensive than policies currently available on the individual
market for $114 per month,
while a middle aged adult will have to pay approximately $260 per month
for insurance. A 21-year-old non-smoker can start as low as $93 a month.
Officials say they used their authority to deny rate increases to
reduce the proposed premiums by “more than 50 percent.” Thirty other
states have have similar authority. The prices Marylanders will pay are lower than the Congressional
Budget Office (CBO) anticipated, but do cost more than the bare-bones
plans that are available today. Residents will have a choice of nine
insurance carriers and three out of four
people purchasing coverage through the exchange will qualify for tax
credits, further reducing the cost of coverage. Nationally, 6 million
out of the 7 million people who are expected to enroll in 2014 will
receive subsidies. “Historically, insurance carriers have been allowed to turn down people
with pre-existing conditions and allow only the healthiest individuals
into their plans,” said Rebecca Pearce, Executive Director of the
Maryland Health Benefit Exchange. “In 2014, that will change, and
740,000 Marylanders will have new access to health coverage with more
robust benefits.Earlier this week, the Connecticut exchange announced that since a new insurer lowered its projected
premiums, “the average cost for an individual-market HealthyCT plan
dropped by 36 percent, from $427 per month to $271.” In Nevada,
preliminary costs find that strong competition between insurers in some
areas of the state will lower individuals’ premiums.The news is on track with a report from the Department of Health and
Human Services, which found that “the lowest cost silver plan in the
individual market in 2014 is, on average, 18 percent less expensive” than past projections.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Norm Ornstein, a congressional expert and scholar at the conserative American Enterprise Institute, criticized GOP leaders' efforts to "sabotage" Obamacare as "sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials."In a National Journal
colum titled, "The Unprecedented—and Contemptible—Attempts to Sabotage
Obamacare," Ornstein said the GOP anti-Obamacare effort is "spinning out
of control" and "simply unprecedented."He noted that after President Bush enacted the Medicare prescription
drug benefit in 2003, Democrats worked with Republicans to improve it
and help seniors rather than attempting to tarnish it for political
gain.Even when Democrats opposed the Iraq war, he said, "they did not try
to sabotage the surge" because "[t]o do so would have been close to
treasonous."Ornstein concludes:

But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its
implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to
many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able
to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options;
to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to
implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to
threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach
of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning
the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting
turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this
kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the
effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and
Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus,
and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican
activists—takes one's breath away.

Senate Democrats have signed onto a letter urging President Barack
Obama to appoint Janet Yellen to be Ben Bernanke's successor as chairman
of the Federal Reserve, according to The Wall Street Journal. Yellen currently serves as the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.The Journal reported it could not confirm the full list of senators
who signed on, but the list appears to represent the more liberal wing
of the Democratic caucus -- a third of the 54 seats they currently hold
in the upper chamber."There's a lot of concern among a lot of Democrats about an
appointment of Larry Summers to that long-term position as Fed
chairman," Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), who signed the letter, told the
Journal. "He was one of the architects of getting rid of Glass-Steagall,
of getting rid of other regulations. There's real concern about his
economic views not really being in line with Obama's views."
Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Angus King (I-ME) are also confirmed to have signed the letter.

Well, Wonkeroos, we have a new, strong contender for the coveted
Legislative Badass of the Year award. This nominee enters the
competition by calling out hypocrisy from his House GOP colleagues in an
awesome new report titled “Pork Barrel Politics.” Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Rep. George Miller (D-CA):

A new analysis by the Office of Congresssman George
Miller finds that 14 members of Congress voted to continue farm
subsidies from which they personally benefit while failing to continue
nutrition aid for 47 million Americans.

Yep. His office released a report detailing how these 14 GOP
Congresscritters have raked in more than $7.2 MILLION in farm subsidies
(aka welfare, also aka YOUR tax dollars) while they voted to completely
gut food stamps for hungry kids. Hahahahaha, sucks to be poor and not a
Member of Congress. Not only did Rep. Miller (D-Honey Badgerville) release this report,
and not only did he call his colleagues out by name, but he straight up
put photos of each of the offending members on his website, in case anyone was interested, because George Miller DOESN’T GIVE A FUCK.Come after the jump and learn more about these foul, soulless human beings. READ MORE »

Recognizing your ex-girlfriend in porn
According to Cosmopolitan magazine, watching porn together can be a
great way to spice up your sex life, and watching it with girls to be a
mixed experience, at best 6 Rules for outdoor sex
Now that the weather's turning warmer, many people are overcome by two urges: to get outside and to get it on

Monday, July 22, 2013

“With No Safety Oversight, Six Flags Will Investigate Roller Coaster
Death Itself,” says a U.S. News headline that we totally could have
written. Does it surprise you to learn that this death trap of an
unregulated roller coaster is in Texas? No, of course it doesn’t. Does
it surprise you that there are absolutely zero elected or appointed
officials charged with coordinating the legislative, bureaucratic, or
legal ramifications of such a death? No, it is Texas, so this too is
unsurprising.

Rosy Esparza of Dallas died Friday night when she fell from the Texas Giant, which is billed as the world’s steepest wooden roller coaster.Six Flags initially said in a statement that it was “working with
authorities” to figure out what happened. But it later had to admit that
it was running the investigation itself because there are no
authorities to work with.

“How is John Boehner helping House Republicans ruin the government
today, along with my access to health care and possibly my ability to
put food on my family?” you might be wondering.The answer is, of course, “Same as yesterday, mostly, only now he is speaking openly about it on Sunday yap shows”:

House Speaker John Boehner says Congress “ought to be
judged on how many laws we repeal” [because] the U.S. has “more laws
than the administration could ever enforce.”

An excellent idea from a man who could not pass his ass with both
hands!..Or IS it? Would Boehner benefit from such a bizarre metric?The answer is no, he would not.For the purposes of critical analysis, we evaluated how the House is
doing so far this year based on how many bills they repealed, and were
not terribly shocked to learn that they are not doing too well! Behold,
the tally of laws they have tried and failed to repeal:READ MORE »

The “war to end all wars” was over, but a new one was just beginning—on the streets of America.It wasn’t much of a fight, really—at least at the start.On the one side was a rising tide of
professional criminals, made richer and bolder by Prohibition, which had
turned the nation “dry” in 1920. In one big city alone— Chicago—an
estimated 1,300 gangs had spread like a deadly virus by the mid-1920s.

Al “Scarface” Capone in a 1929 mug shot

There was no easy cure. With wallets bursting
from bootlegging profits, gangs outfitted themselves with “Tommy” guns
and operated with impunity by paying off politicians and police
alike. Rival gangs led by the powerful Al “Scarface” Capone and the
hot-headed George “Bugs” Moran turned the city streets into a virtual
war zone with their gangland clashes. By 1926, more than 12,000
murders were taking place every year across America.

On the other side was law enforcement, which was
outgunned (literally) and ill-prepared at this point in history to
take on the surging national crime wave. Dealing with the bootlegging
and speakeasies was challenging enough, but the “Roaring Twenties”
also saw bank robbery, kidnapping, auto theft, gambling, and drug
trafficking become increasingly common crimes. More often than not,
local police forces were hobbled by the lack of modern tools and
training. And their jurisdictions stopped abruptly at their borders.

Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone

In the young Bureau of Investigation, things
were not much better. In the early twenties, the agency was no model
of efficiency. It had a growing reputation for politicized
investigations. In 1923, in the midst of the Teapot Dome scandal that
rocked the Harding Administration, the nation learned that Department
of Justice officials had sent Bureau agents to spy on members of
Congress who had opposed its policies. Not long after the news of
these secret activities broke, President Calvin Coolidge fired
Harding’s Attorney General Harry Daugherty, naming Harlan Fiske Stone
as his successor in 1924.

A good housecleaning was in order for the
Bureau, and it came at the hands of a young lawyer by the name of J.
Edgar Hoover. Hoover had joined the Department of Justice in 1917 and
had quickly risen through its ranks. In 1921, he was named Assistant
Director of the Bureau. Three years later, Stone named him Director.
Hoover would go on to serve for nearly another half century.

The first graduates of the Bureau’s training
program for national police exectives, the forerunner of today’s
National Academy, in 1935. Since then, the National Academy has
graduated more than 41,000 officers from 166 countries.

A young J. Edgar Hoover

At the outset, the 29-year-old Hoover was
determined to reform the Bureau, quickly and thoroughly, to make it a
model of professionalism. He did so by weeding out the “political
hacks” and incompetents, laying down a strict code of conduct for
agents, and instituting regular inspections of Headquarters and field
operations. He insisted on rigorous hiring criteria, including
background checks, interviews, and physical tests for all special
agent applicants, and in January 1928, he launched the first formal
training for incoming agents, a two-month course of instruction and
practical exercises in Washington, D.C. Under Hoover’s direction, new
agents were also required to be 25 to 35 years old, preferably with
experience in law or accounting.

When Hoover took over in 1924, the Bureau had
about 650 employees, including 441 special agents. In five years, with
the rash of firings it had just 339 special agents and less than 600
total employees. But it was beginning to become the organized,
professional, and effective force that Hoover envisioned.

One important step in that direction came during
Hoover’s first year at the helm, when the Bureau was given the
responsibility of consolidating the nation’s two major collections of
fingerprint files. In the summer of 1924, Hoover quickly created an
Identification Division (informally called “Ident” in the organization
for many years to come) to gather prints from police agencies
nationwide and to search them upon request for matches to criminals
and crime evidence.

New agents train on the rooftop of the
Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C., where FBI
Headquarters was located from 1933 to 1972

It was a vital new tool for all of law
enforcement—the first major building block in Hoover’s growing quest
to bring the discipline of science to Bureau investigations and
scientific services to law enforcement nationwide. Combined with its
identification orders, or IOs—early wanted posters that included
fingerprints and all manner of details about criminal suspects on the
run—the Bureau was fast becoming a national hub for crime records. In
the late 1920s, the Bureau began exchanging fingerprints with Canada
and added more friendly foreign governments in 1932; the following
year, it created a corresponding civil fingerprint file for
non-criminal cases. By 1936, the agency had a total reservoir of
100,000 fingerprint cards; by 1946, that number had swelled to 100
million.

Welcome to the World of Fingerprints

We take it for granted now, but at the turn of
the twentieth century the use of fingerprints to identify criminals
was still in its infancy.

More popular was the Bertillon system, which
measured dozens of features of a criminal’s face and body and recorded
the series of precise numbers on a large card along with a
photograph. After all, the thinking went, what were the chances that
two different people would look the same and have identical
measurements in all the minute particulars logged by the Bertillon
method?

Will West

William West

Not great, of course. But inevitably a case came along to beat the odds.

It happened this way. In 1903, a convicted
criminal named Will West was taken to Leavenworth federal prison in
Kansas. The clerk at the admissions desk, thinking he recognized West,
asked if he’d ever been to Leavenworth. The new prisoner denied it.
The clerk took his Bertillon measurements and went to the files, only
to return with a card for a “William” West. Turns out, Will and
William bore an uncanny resemblance (they may have been identical
twins). And their Bertillon measurements were a near match.

The clerk asked Will again if he’d ever been to
the prison. “Never,” he protested. When the clerk flipped the card
over, he discovered Will was telling the truth. “William” was already in
Leavenworth, serving a life sentence for murder! Soon after, the
fingerprints of both men were taken, and they were clearly different.

It was this incident that caused the Bertillon system to fall “flat on its face,” as reporter

Bureau fingerprint experts at work in 1932

Don Whitehead aptly put it. The next year,
Leavenworth abandoned the method and start fingerprinting its inmates.
Thus began the first federal fingerprint collection.

In New York, the state prison had begun
fingerprinting its inmates as early as 1903. Following the event at
Leavenworth, other police and prison officials followed suit.
Leavenworth itself eventually began swapping prints with other
agencies, and its collection swelled to more than 800,000 individual
records.

By 1920, though, the International Association
of Chiefs of Police had become concerned about the erratic quality and
disorganization of criminal identification records in America. It
urged the Department of Justice to merge the country’s two major
fingerprint collections—the federal one at Leavenworth and its own set
of state and local ones held in Chicago.

Four years later, a bill was passed providing
the funds and giving the task to the young Bureau of Investigation. On
July 1, 1924, J. Edgar Hoover, who had been appointed Acting Director
less than two months earlier, quickly formed a Division of
Identification. He announced that the Bureau would welcome submissions
from other jurisdictions and provide identification services to all
law enforcement partners. The FBI has done so ever since.

Using fingerprints to catch the guilty and
free the innocent was just the beginning. The lawlessness of the 1920s
got the nation’s attention, and a number of independent
studies—including the Wickersham Commission set up by President Herbert
Hoover in May 1929—confirmed what everyone seemed to already know:
that law enforcement at every level needed to modernize.

One glaring need was to get a handle on the
national scope of crime by collecting statistics that would enable
authorities to understand trends and better focus resources. Taking
the lead as it did in many police reforms in the early twentieth
century, the International Association of Chiefs of Police created a
committee to advance the issue, with Hoover and the Bureau
participating. In 1929, the Chiefs adopted a system to classify and
report crimes and began to collect crime statistics. The association
recommended that the Bureau—with its experience in centralizing
criminal records—take the lead. Congress agreed, and the Bureau assumed
responsibility for the program in 1930. It has been taking this
national pulse on crime ever since.

Charles “Lucky” Luciano

The third major development was a scientific
crime lab, long a keen interest of Hoover’s. After becoming Director,
he had encouraged his agents to keep an eye on advances in science. By
1930, the Bureau was hiring outside experts on a case-by-case basis.
Over the next few years, the Bureau’s first technical laboratory took
root, thanks in large part to a visionary special agent named Charles
Appel. By 1932, the lab was fully operational and soon providing
scientific examinations and analysis for the Bureau and its partners
around the country.

This trio of advances came just in time, as
the crime wave that began in the 1920s was about to reach its peak. By
the early 1930s, cities like St. Paul, Minnesota, had become virtual
training grounds for young crooks, while Hot Springs, Arkansas, had
turned into a safe haven and even a vacation spot for the criminal
underworld. Al Capone was locked away for good in 1931 (thanks in part
to the Bureau), but his Chicago Outfit carried on fine without him
and would actually experience a resurgence in the coming decades. The
“Five Families” of the New York Mafia were also emerging during this
period, with “Lucky” Luciano setting up the “Commission” to unite the
mob and “Murder, Inc.” to carry out its hits. Prohibition was
ultimately repealed in 1933, but by then, the Great Depression was in
full force, and with honest jobs harder to come by than ever, the
dishonest ones sometimes seemed more attractive than standing in soup
lines.

Employees of the “Ident” division in 1929. The Bureau began managing the nation’s fingerprint collections five years earlier.

By 1933, an assortment of dangerous and
criminally prolific gangsters was wreaking havoc across America,
especially in the Midwest. Their names would soon be known far and wide.

There was John Dillinger, with his crooked
smile, who managed to charm the press and much of America into
believing he was nothing more than a harmless, modern-day Robin Hood.
In reality, Dillinger and his revolving crew of gunslingers—violent
thugs like Homer Van Meter, Harry “Pete” Pierpont, and John “Red”
Hamilton—were shooting up banks across America’s heartland, stealing
hundreds of thousands of dollars and murdering at least one policeman
along the way.

The Birth of the FBI Lab

In the pages of FBI history, November 24, 1932,
is considered the official birthday of the FBI Laboratory. But it is
really a “declared” anniversary for what was an evolving concept.

From the 1920s on, Director Hoover had been
actively interested in scientific analysis, and by 1930 he had
authorized the use of outside experts on a case-by-case basis in
identification and evidence examination matters. Then, over a two-year
period, the first true “technical” laboratory functions began to take
shape. When all these functions moved into Room 802 of the Old
Southern Railway Building in Washington, D.C., it seemed appropriate to
recognize that a true lab had been born.

Special Agent Charles Appel

It was Special Agent Charles Appel who was its
midwife. He had served as an aviator in World War I before joining
the Bureau in 1924—and right from the start he focused on meticulous
investigations based on scientific detection.

Appel was an extraordinary man with
extraordinary vision, fully backed by Director Hoover with the
necessary resources. He took courses to further his knowledge of
state-of-the-art techniques, and by 1931, he began seeking expert
opinion on starting a crime lab. In July 1932, when he proposed “a
separate division for the handling of so-called crime prevention work”
under which “the criminological research laboratory could be placed,”
he got an immediate endorsement. By September, Room 802 in the Old
Southern Railway building was fully equipped. By November 24, it was
in business.

The FBI Laboratory’s first home: Room 802 of the Old Southern Railway Building in Washington, D.C.

The new lab was pretty sophisticated by 1932
standards. It included a brand new ultra-violet light machine; a
microscope, on loan from Bausch and Lomb until the requisition for its
purchase could be finalized; moulage kits (for taking impressions);
photographic supplies; and chemical sets. A machine to examine the
interior of gun barrels was on order.

For about a year, Appel was the Bureau’s
one-man lab. His handwriting and typewriter font analysis solved a
poisoning case in 1933. His analysis of handwriting on the Lindbergh
kidnapping ransom notes ultimately helped convict Bruno Richard
Hauptmann.

Agents across the Bureau soon started receiving
training on what this new lab could do for them and their cases, and
they spread the word about the value of scientific work to their law
enforcement partners.

By January 1940, the lab had a total of 46
employees. As America headed into a second world war, its growing skills
and capabilities would be needed more than ever.

There was Clyde Barrow and his girlfriend
Bonnie Parker, an inseparable, love-struck couple who—partnered at
times with the Barrow brothers and others—were robbing and murdering
their way across a half dozen or so states.

There was the ruthless, almost psychopathic
“Baby Face” Nelson, who worked with everyone from Roger “The Terrible”
Touhy to Al Capone and Dillinger over the course of his crime career
and teamed up with John Paul Chase and Fatso Negri in his latter days.
Nelson was a callous killer who thought nothing of murdering lawmen;
he gunned down three Bureau agents, for instance, in the span of seven
months. And there was the cunning Alvin Karpis and his Barker brother
sidekicks, who not only robbed banks and trains but engineered two
major kidnappings of rich Minnesota business executives in 1933.

The rising popularity of the FBI’s “G-men” spawned hundreds of toys and games.

“Machine Gun” Kelly and the Legend of the G-Men

Before 1934, “G-Man” was underworld slang for
any and all government agents. In fact, the detectives in J. Edgar
Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation were so little known that they were
often confused with Secret Service or Prohibition Bureau agents. By
1935, though, only one kind of government employee was known by that
name, the special agents of the Bureau.

George “Machine Gun” Kelly

How this change came about is not entirely
clear, but September 26, 1933, played a central role in the apocryphal
origins of this change.

On that day, Bureau of Investigation agents and
Tennessee police officers arrested gangster George “Machine Gun”
Kelly. He was a “wanted fugitive” for good reason. Two months earlier
Kelly had kidnapped oil magnate Charles Urschel and held him for
$200,000 in ransom. After Urschel was released, the Bureau coordinated
a multi-state investigation, drawing investigative information from
its own field offices as well as from other police sources, as it
identified and then tracked the notorious gangster across the country.

On September 26, “Machine Gun” Kelly was found
hiding in a decrepit Memphis residence. Some early press reports said
that a tired, perhaps hung-over Kelly stumbled out of his bed
mumbling something like “I was expecting you.” Another version of the
event held that Kelly emerged from his room, hands-up, crying “Don’t
shoot G-Men, don’t shoot.” Either way, Kelly was arrested without
violence.

The rest is history. The more colorful version
sparked the popular imagination and “G-Men” became synonymous with
the special agents of the FBI.

All of these criminals would become “public
enemies,” actively hunted by law enforcement nationwide. At first, the
Bureau was playing only a bit part in pursuing these gangsters, since
few of their crimes violated federal laws. But that began to change
with the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping, which gave the Bureau jurisdiction
in these cases for the first time; with the “Kansas City Massacre” in
June 1933, a bloody slaughter at a train station that claimed the
lives of four lawmen, including a Bureau agent; and with the rise to
national prominence of John Dillinger.

“Doc” Barker

Kate “Ma” Barker

Alvin Karpis

Using whatever federal laws it could hang its
hat on, the Bureau turned its full attention to catching these
gangsters. And despite some stumbles along the way, the successes
began to add up. By the end of 1934, most of these public enemies had
been killed or captured.

Bonnie and Clyde were the first to fall, in
May 1934, at the hands of Texas lawmen (with the Bureau playing a
small supporting role in tracking them down). In July, Melvin Purvis
and a team of agents caught up with Dillinger, who was shot dead
leaving a Chicago theater. “Pretty Boy” Floyd, one of the hired hands
of the Kansas City Massacre, was killed in a shootout with Bureau
agents and local law enforcement on an Ohio farm in October 1934. And
Nelson died the following month after a bloody firefight with two
special agents, who were also killed.

The Bureau caught up with the rest soon
enough. Agents arrested “Doc” Barker in January 1935, and the infamous
“Ma” Barker and her son Fred were killed by Bureau agents in Florida
eight days later. Alvin Karpis, the brains of the gang, was captured
in May 1936 and ended up in Alcatraz.

In just a few transformative years, thanks to
the successful battle against gangsters, the once unknown Bureau and
its “G-Men” became household names and icons of popular culture. Along
the way, Congress had given it newfound powers, too, including the
ability to carry guns and make arrests. In July 1935, as the capstone
of its newfound identity, the organization was renamed the Federal
Bureau of Investigation—the FBI.

As the decade came to a close, the FBI would
find itself shifting gears once again. War was brewing in Europe, and
pro-Nazi groups were becoming more and more vocal in the U.S.,
claiming fascism was the answer to American woes. The gangsters, it
turned out, were just a prelude to the dark days to come.

Above: The Florida home (right) where “Doc” and
“Ma” Barker were killed in a shootout with Bureau agents. Top Right:
The cache of Barker weapons recovered by agents after the firefight

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Last year, Pennsylvania Republican House Leader Mike Turzai (R-PA) admitted
that voter identification efforts were designed to suppress Democratic
votes, telling a Republican Steering Committee meeting that Voter ID “is
gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
Romney ended up losing the state, but Republicans still believe that
they successfully kept Democrats from supporting President Obama. As
Pennsylvania’s GOP Chairman Rob Gleason told Pennsylvania Cable Network
earlier this week, the party “cut Obama by 5 percent” in 2012 and
“probably Voter ID had helped a bit in that.”

The constitutionality of law is now being challenged before the state
Supreme Court, where statistician Bernard Siskin testified on Monday
that the measure would disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of
registered voters, disproportionately affecting “Democrats and members of minority groups.” “By his calculations, Democrats are three times as likely
as Republicans and minorities are about twice as likely as whites to
lack a valid ID,” the Huffington Post’s Saki Knafo reported.In December, Republican strategist Scott Tranter acknowledged
that “a lot of us are campaign professionals and we want to do
everything we can to help our sides. Sometimes we think that’s voter ID,
sometimes we think that’s longer lines, whatever it may be.” The Romney
campaign’s Wisconsin co-chair, state Sen. Alberta Darling (R), also suggested
that the Massachusetts governor would have won Wisconsin but for the
fact that the state’s voter ID law was declared unconstitutional by a
state court.Although the laws’ supporters claim that they are necessary to combat in-person voter fraud, a voter is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit fraud. One study found that 0.0002 percent of votes are the product of such fraud.

Friday, July 12, 2013

A little more than half of American voters attribute gridlock in
Washington to Republican obstructionism and not President Barack Obama's
inability to persuade, a poll released Friday found.According to the latest survey from Quinnipiac University,
51 percent of voters believe gridlock is mainly a result of the
congressional GOP's determination to block any of Obama's initiatives. A
mere 35 percent blamed gridlock on Obama's lack of "personal skills to
convince leaders of Congress to work together." Obama has drawn blame from both Republicans and the press for
purportedly being too isolated and unwilling to perform the type of
cajoling necessary to making a deal in Washington. Chief among those
critics has been New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who blamed Obama
for the failure of gun legislation in the Senate because he "doesn’t know how to work the system."

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

It’s not just the NSA that’s collecting massive amounts of personal
data with judicial approval. In a ruling publicized by EarthRights
International, a federal judge in New York approved a subpoena
by Chevron to obtain any documents Microsoft has related to the
identity of 30 anonymous individuals allegedly of interest in the
litigation, including every IP address over a period of nine years. The case involves an $18.2 billion judgment against Chevron
in an Ecuador court, for massive environmental contamination from oil
drilling. The Ecuadorian court found that Chevron had dumped toxic waste
into Amazon waterways used by indigenous groups for drinking water and
caused massive harm to the rainforest. Chevron responded by filing a
lawsuit in U.S. court alleging that the plaintiffs engaged in a
conspiracy to defraud the company. As part of this lawsuit, Chevron has subpoenaed Google, Microsoft,
and Yahoo to request all information related to the email addresses of
more than 100 advocates, journalists, lawyers, and others. These
individuals are not parties to the suit, but Chevron alleges that they
are involved directly or indirectly in the litigation, and may have been
outspoken critics of Chevron’s conduct. U.S. District Judge Lewis A.
Kaplan explains the scope of what Chevron was seeking from Microsoft:

To summarize, if Microsoft still has and were to produce the requested information, Chevron
would learn the IP address associated with every login for every
account over a nine-year period. Chevron could identify the countries,
states, or even cities where the users logged into accounts, and
perhaps, in some instances, could determine the actual building
addresses. Chevron would not learn who logged into the accounts. That is to say
that Chevron would know who created (or purported to create) the email
accounts but would not know if there was a single user or multiple users
for each account. Nevertheless, the subpoenaed information
might allow Chevron to infer the movements of the users over the
relevant period (at a high level of generality) and might permit Chevron
to make inferences about some of the users’ professional and personal
relationships.

Late last month, the court granted the first of these subpoenas in
full, holding that the anonymous individuals were not entitled to First
Amendment protection because they may not be U.S. citizens. As human
rights lawyer Marissa Vahlsing explains:

The account-holders in this case were proceeding anonymously, which the First Amendment permits. Because
of this, Judge Kaplan was provided with no information about the
account holders’ residency or places of birth. It is somewhat amazing
then, that Judge Kaplan assumed that the account holders were not U.S. citizens. As
far as I know, a judge has never before made this assumption when
presented with a First Amendment claim. We have to ask then: on what
basis did Judge Kaplan reach out and make this assumption?

Given similar suggestions that NSA data collection is limited at least in some ways to non-U.S. citizens, this decision – much more public and available than the secret but reportedly expansive rulings
of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – should give serious
pause to those who think that limiting data collection to non-U.S.
citizens protects the rest of us. It is worth noting that this case
involves only the First Amendment, and not the Fourth, because parties
in civil suits have a whole lot of leeway
to access data via administrative subpoenas, which are typically not
considered “searches” (and/or seizures) under the Fourth Amendment.
Nonetheless, their speech, associations, and political activities,
remain protected under the First.

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Hey college kids, or people that have college-aged kids, or people that
once were in college, or people generally! Perhaps once upon a time you
went away to college, and when you did, your mom or dad or random
stranger that took care of you gave you things like food and coffee and
paper towels (ok the last one seems like a weird thing to send) to take
to college, right? Seems totally reasonable. However, your moms or dads
or whoevers probably did not take the food and coffee and paper towels
(are those hard to come by? are we missing something?) from their
employer and give them to you, a la Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell.READ MORE »

Monday, July 01, 2013

Shortly before Election Day last year, mailers
went out to Texas voters featuring pictures of a Democratic
congressional candidate and a rare species of spider, whose discovery
had forced stoppage of an important highway construction project.“The
same left-wing extremists who support Pete Gallego want more burdensome
regulations that put the interests of spiders above our need to create
more jobs,” the flier declared, referring to discovery of the endangered
Braken Bat Cave meshweaver. “The best way to stop left-wing extremists
from killing jobs is to vote against their hand-picked candidate Pete
Gallego.”The group that put out the mailer, A Better America Now, reported
to the Federal Election Commission it had spent about $65,000 for the
mailer and TV advertising in the hard-fought race to represent Texas’ 23rd district.But in a tax return
recently filed with the IRS, the group claimed it did not spend any
money at all on “direct or indirect political campaign activities.”The tax return is signed under the penalty of perjury by the group’s president, Bob Portrie, and the accounting firm LBA Group. Neither responded to requests for comment.We first reported on A Better America Now earlier this year, showing it had told the IRS in a 2011 application for nonprofit status that it did not plan to spend any money on elections. (That document was sent to ProPublica last year by the IRS, even though the application was still pending and thus not supposed to be released.)“This
type of inaccurate reporting by electioneering nonprofit groups has a
long history,” says Public Citizen’s Craig Holman, when asked about the
group’s most recent filing. “It is rooted in the fact that the IRS
almost never holds these groups accountable for such false
declarations.”A Better America Now was a bit player in the elections. But it’s also an example of the kind of increasingly common outside groups that inject anonymous money into political campaigns.Such social welfare nonprofits are not supposed
to have political campaign activity as their primary purpose — but the
ambiguities around how the IRS measures such activity and how it screens
the groups are at the center of the recent investigations of the IRS’s treatment of Tea Party groups.ProPublica has documented how nonprofits that spent millions of dollars on ads in the 2010 elections failed to report or underreported
that political spending to the IRS. The tax form that the groups are
required to file with the IRS specifically asks for details on any
campaign spending.One of the curious things about A Better America Now is that, though the group spent money in a congressional and a state legislative race in southwest Texas, it is based a few miles off the beach near Jacksonville, Florida. The president of A Better America Now, Portrie, is also the head of a consulting firm, the Fenwick Group.
The two groups are listed at the same address. Fenwick’s website says
it works with “organizations across the healthcare, financial services,
insurance, retail and investment sectors.”Portrie and Fenwick were also linked to ads run by another Florida-based social welfare nonprofit, America is Not Stupid, in last year’s U.S. Senate race in Montana. Ads by America is Not Stupid featured a talking baby complaining about alleged cuts to Medicare by President Obama, and referring to the baby’s stinking diaper.In 2010, the New York Times reported
on links between the Fenwick Group and yet another politically active
nonprofit, the Coalition to Protect Seniors. Ads by that group featured
the same talking baby ad.In last year’s race in Texas, which attracted a lot of outside spending on both sides, the Democrat, Gallego, prevailed over Republican incumbent Quico Canseco.